HUBERT SELBY, JR, has passed away at the age of 75. His best known work, Last Exit to Brooklyn, was massively controversial in its day, given the book's notorious gang bang scene. Most works of literature pre Mr Selby managed to skip the graphic description of gang bangs; even Dostoevsky chose to gloss over the details of how Sonia made a living in Crime and Punishment, and we did not get a blow by blow account of Temple's rape by corncob in Faulkner's Sanctuary, but we live in a much more literal age and we must see what is going on, even when we know what is going on. A failure of the imagination on our part, I think.